Beauty of ice
Sue Weterings’ lens turns icebergs into fantastical cascading sculptures.
Roughly once a week I go to breakfast. It’s usually on a Thursday or Friday, just when you need a pick up and a bit of fussing to get you to the end of the week.
And for the past month or so, there has been a cheeky seal watching me eat my poached eggs. His head is just above the water in the photographic print by Sue Weterings that hangs in the cafe, taken in Antarctica.
He isn’t looking with any greed or jealously at me tucking into my spoil, but rather as if he thinks it is a bit amusing and at any moment he might give me a wink.
So with Mr Seal as my lure, I went to visit the exhibition Antarctica at Taylor Jensen Fine Arts, albeit running a bit late with this review printed on the day the exhibition is due to close, its schedule from October 21 until November 11.
Now as a general rule, photography isn’t my favourite art media to review. I’m more likely to be drawn to the immediate handson materials of paint and sculpture.
Cute animal pictures I find hard to take seriously as art – surely more the stuff of screensavers and shared jokes over coffee. But this little guy (Mr. Seal) had a great sense of immediacy, his head just in reach, a subtle monochrome colouring and a simple composition.
Sue Weterings trained with a Diploma in Photography at UCOL 10 years ago. Her focus is landscape and the natural environment. A trip to Antarctica provided the material for this exhibition – her first solo show – and more. It looks to have inspired and enthused the artist, allowing her to create some truly beautiful images.
What Weterings photographs of our south-most continent utilise is all the things that Antarctica doesn’t have – buildings, people, even animals aren’t that common, and colour.
It’s all shades of whites and blue. And what a blue it is, seemingly iridescent with a glow that looks almost artificial. With this starkness, Antarctica’s icy monoliths become cascading sculptures, giant and fantastical.
They remind me of Michelangelo’s Trevi Fountain in Rome, but far bigger and grander, the natural icy forms out-powering any marble sculpture hued by a human artist.
There are archways and peaks, sensuously rounded hills and soft valleys, towers and jagged precipices. Set against clear skies and still seas, Weterings’ cleverly directed lens has created compositions that inspire wonder and awe.
There is something about the way the view is framed that encourages us to see the icebergs as a sort of statuary, a subtle cropping so they take centre stage in the vista.
These are the works from the exhibition that sing to me.
There are those classical Antarctic shots in the show – of penguins massing near the ice, closer views to see the queerness of an emperor penguin and a lazing leopard seal – but these are more standard naturalist depictions. It is the towering ice forms that are the memorable.
Antarctica, Art Exhibition, photographs by Sue Weterings, closes at Taylor Jensen today.